Today is the first day my age group with co-morbidities has opened up for the Covid-19 vaccine in Washington State. Woo hoo. Finally, carrying around the bonus weight of a 12-year-old is paying off! I knew it would eventually—thank goodness I didn’t choose to spend the past year improving my diet and working out! Z and I have our names in the hopper, but we aren’t optimistic that it will happen anytime soon. I’m guessing by August 2022 maybe we’ll finally be able to get an appointment.

I’m okay with that wait because right now I’m not sure I’m ready to merge back into society. I know lots of people are thrilled at the prospect of wearing real clothes and going out to restaurants, but the thought of having to put on a bra and give up my fleece clogs (which have seen better days) and climb back into a pair of pants that zip seems equivalent to you telling me I have to learn to speak Portuguese because business will no longer be conducted in English. It’s daunting. I’ve gone feral without realizing it and am hoping someone puts together some TikToks or maybe a TEDTalk on how to return to polite society.

Some of us have been living inside this pandemic more than others. While Instagram alerts me to people who have zoomed off somewhere for Spring Break and feel they are doing their parts because they wear a mask over one ear, others of us are just sitting still, waiting for the All Clear.

When we do go out for our daily walk, we leave the house after 6 when First Hill is quieting down and we’re less likely to run into a lot of people. We stay within an 8 block radius, double-mask, and don’t linger over the chip aisle at Bartell when we pop in to pick-up prescriptions once a month (and treats to keep us in the co-morbidity category). This evening on our walk, we approached a man walking a dachshund who looked like a jovial creature, but the man wrapped the leash around his hand two extra times just as Z and I darted into the street to give them a wide Dr. Fauci sanctioned berth. As we passed, the little devil started barking with a fury and the man looked at us sheepishly and shrugged. I guess we’re all feeling kind of territorial and testy these days.

Last week, Z and I felt like we were living on the edge when we took a long walk and went further west than 9th Avenue. How far did we walk, you ask , that it made us feel so reckless? Why, we walked to 7th Avenue! Two blocks closer to Puget Sound than we normally go, though it was still a good eight blocks or so from the actual waterfront. That’s two blocks closer to downtown than I’ve been since last March. We walked through Freeway Park, peered into the Washington State Convention Center (a.k.a. the place with the escalators that in the Before Times would bring my tired ass halfway up the hill towards home if we went downtown), and then we circled around to see the monstrosity of buildings that have sprung up and are now towering above poor Town Hall. Then we skedaddled back to our own territory as if we’d let ourselves step into some radioactive Forbidden Zone and had to get home and have a Silkwood-style shower to rinse off the contaminants.

It was nice to see the trees in the park which are in bloom. It was eerie to see the Convention Center all locked up to keep passers-thru like us outside. It was disappointing to see that their flowerbeds were dormant when they normally have plants no matter what season. But mostly, it made me antsy and aware of all the things we haven’t done for over a year.

Normally, nestled in our nest at Oh La La we are taken by the things we now see out our windows—an eagle family soaring over the neighborhood and over Lake Union, a hummingbird that peers into our apartment periodically to check on us, the weather systems blowing across the vast expanse of sky that’s now available to us. Mostly, I’ve appreciated this past year and how these small things hold the weight of something monumental. We see the eagle family and one of us shouts to the other one as if Ed McMahon, fresh from the grave, just showed up at the door with one of those big cardboard checks from Publishers Clearing House. But there was something about seeing the locked doors at the convention center that suddenly made me aware of everything we haven’t been doing. How long it’s been since I’ve shopped in City Target, gotten flowers at Pike Market, seen a movie in the theater with the “good” seats, been in a car, driven out of the city. I hadn’t been missing any of those things, but now I am.

Let’s be honest, the thing I’m most looking forward to though is the possibility that I might have something interesting to write about again on this blog once I’m riding a bus, drinking tea in a cafe, having an adventure to one of the islands, flying back to Indiana. I can only make up so many stories about those eagles and what they’re up to.

Since we didn’t fall off the edge of the earth when we widened our walking route by two blocks I have no real stories to share this month. The eagles are aloft. The crows are cawing. The neighborhood dogs are barking. The vaccine appointments are full. Try again tomorrow.

Oh, I do have this story to leave you with and it involves this squonky tree.

For the last several months, this poor thing was standing in a pool of running water that we’d see on our evening—after-hours-fewer-people-to-navigate—be-masked walks on our 8 block leash. We couldn’t tell where the water was coming from—it seemed to be burbling up from underground and pooling on the sidewalk and in the street. Several times a week we’d leap over the standing water and stare at the tree, wondering why no one was throwing it a life preserver. Why wasn’t the city stopping the leak? Why weren’t the owners of the commercial building that sat next to the tree alerting the people who fix such things? We’d tut tut and continue our walk. Over and over again. And then one day, I looked at that tree and felt fed up that no one was coming to rescue it. I’m no arborist or plumber, but it was clear this wasn’t going to end well. I’d had enough.

So I went home and sent off an email to the Seattle Department of Transportation and pointed out to them that it was a waste of water, a waste of a tree, and that someone could slip on the waterlogged sidewalk and sue the city.

I’m turning into that lady.

Maybe they thought I was planning to slip on the waterlogged sidewalk and had a lawyer lined up because they wrote me back in two days and said that they checked into it and were getting to the bottom of it. I’m happy to report that sidewalk and the base of the tree are now dry and the tree is budding.

With all the first responders working tirelessly the past year, I can only assume that I won’t be getting a key to the city or a good citizen award for my work on behalf of one neighborhood tree, but it does feel like this pandemic has made me feel more proprietary about that 8 block radius Z and I have been covering for the last year. Here’s to a longer leash in the future.